doublesCs

> You are confusing weather and climate.

As a non-native english speaker, I wasn't aware these were different things, and you didn't clarify. Could you explain the difference insofar as it's related to this conversation? The dictionary didn't help much; they still look like synonyms to me.

Weather[1]

1 : the state of the atmosphere with respect to heat or cold, wetness or dryness, calm or storm, clearness or cloudiness

Climate[2]

1 : a region of the earth having specified climatic conditions

2 : a : the average course or condition of the weather at a place usually over a period of years as exhibited by temperature, wind velocity, and precipitation b : the prevailing set of conditions (as of temperature and humidity) indoors a climate-controlled office 3 : the prevailing influence or environmental conditions characterizing a group or period : atmosphere

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weather

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/climate

I find it sadder that people talk such glaring nonsense and are taken seriously. Extremely sad.

> For five weeks, approximately 50% of doctors in the county reduced their practice and withheld care for anything but emergencies.

The answer is right here. Anything but emergencies.

Ouch. You know, I've heard many times about the GNU / Linux conversation but not being an expert I didn't really know where one starts and the other ends. So your comment has been extremely useful for me, thank you. And yes, we should pay more homage to GNU...

I keep hearing this. How is it that in practice I can get my desktop to do anything I want, but I can't get my phone to do anything I want?

You have 12 kids?

Now do Googolplex:1

I'll take the fact you didn't answer as "yes, it absolutely would".

> The issue is that nationalistic flamewar makes people angry and dumb (and worse). People who want to rant and post denunciatory rhetoric—whom there are a lot of, and growing—need to find another place to do that.

I understand and commend the taking down of nationalistic flamewars, for the most part. But that way of operating has one flaw: it gives cover for very back things being carried out, since very bad things are polarising and therefore its denouncing a "flamewar".

I apologise for the question because there is no way to ask it that isn't polarising, but I would really like to know: If Nazi Germany was putting Jews in trains right now, would a post about it get removed from HN? It's a serious question, I think your users deserve to know.

wtf... :-(

EDIT: any idea why this also got flagged on HN?

I don't have access. Could someone kindly clarify what this is about?

> Harvard online education is worth not much.

> The whole value proposition of Harvard is that you socialise and bond with the sort of people who get in to Harvard. You probably have the phone number of whoever runs Goldman Sachs [0] and you know the President of Whereveristan's daughter because she was in your class

You sound like you're contradicting yourself.

Hi Steve, thanks for your talk and for the links. Are those repos pixie dependencies? Or are you saying that pixie works like those repos?

Is this a book in the HL universe?

> I see them as highly educated people who excel in relativism and twist ethics and law to achieve narrow goals without regard to principles.

That's how I see most lawyers.

3 out of 4 responses currently say the answer is to use Tor. That's a very techie response.

I disagree. I think that freedom of internet is not a tech problem, it's a legal problem. How do you help? The only possibilities I can think of are:

- If you're a lawyer, find some cases you find worthwhile

- Campaign to raise awareness of specific points you find important (e.g. E2E encryption etc)

- Financially support organizations that you find are doing good work.

If dropbox actually did any of these things, people would be complaining about walled gardens.

People aren't wearing enough hats for what purpose?

Again, I think you're not really looking at the numbers. You're just going "the world didn't end, lets move on". I would say it's very significantly different from countries that did it well.

Deaths per 1M for similar size countries in europe:

Belgium - 844 [1]

Sweden - 543

Netherlands - 358

Ireland - 352

Switzerland - 227

Portugal - 160

Denmark - 105

Romania - 94

Austria - 78

Hungary - 61

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/in-defense-of-belgium-corona...

If you still think Sweden did a good job, I'm not sure I can help you any more.

> But we can ignore the numbers and just see the bodies did not pile up in Sweden streets. From this I can not say with certainty any more that quarantine was worth it considering it does not come without serious downsides.

I agree with you that naive comparison of numbers is difficult. That said, Yes, you've just showed what's problematic in ignoring the numbers and focusing only on what is evident. If your mind can only comprehend either "all hunky dorey" or "bodies piling up on the street", then I indeed Sweden is closer to the former. Bodies would never be piling up on the street in any concievable scenario with this virus, as this virus has a case fatality rate of about 0.1% average for the population and our society's infrastructure can easily handle 0.1% of its population bodies spread over a period of years. I hoped that the people in charge could be a bit more sophisticated, but apparently that's not the case in many countries (e.g. Sweden, UK)

> Yes but that was dropped across the board, it was nothing in particular to do with this firm which is just one of many that sought to profit from the chaos.

Again, the story isn't that they sought to profit from chaos, it's that they got the contract. Can we focus on that? Instead of saying "they were trying to profit", can we start from "of course they were trying to profit, but why wasn't the tender made public, and who made the decision to give it to them?"

> Combined with WHO fluctuating to the extremes with "you need, you don't need a mask", Sweden no quarantine results vs rest of Europe, in general numbers not making much sense even for one country over periods of time (not comparing numbers from different countries), it's not hard to make a case that the current response to covid is for making money primarily and not caring about general population welfare.

Are you suggesting that Sweden had good results by using no quarantine?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Sorting by deaths per capita, and excluding tiny countries, the countries with the highest death rate in the world were:

- UK - Spain - Italy - Sweden - France - USA

UK did a SHIT job (incompetent government, uneducated population; I know, I live here). Spain and Italy were the first countries to get mass infections before the world realized that covid wasn't just a China problem, of course they're gonna rank high. Then you have Sweden.

> It appears what happened is, during the height of the crisis, a bunch of amoral City spivs thought it was appropriate to speculate on PPE.

No, the story isn't that someone decided to speculate. The story is how someone who's a speculator got such a contract.

In fact, he says this explicitely

> The normal public procurement tendering process has pre-qualification criteria which companies have to meet. These will normally include so many years of experience in the specific sector, employment of suitably qualified staff, possession of the required physical infrastructure and a measure of financial stability. This is perhaps obvious – otherwise you or I could simply stick in a bid to build the HS2 railway that is £10 billion cheaper than anybody else, win the contract then go and look for a builder.

Obvious submarine article / PR. The goal is to signal how concerned with ethics DeepMind is.

Just to get a sense for the crowd: am I the only one who doesn't care much about the news industry?

Keeping with what's new in society is important insofar as having an informed population is vital for the correct functioning of a democracy. But the "news industry" is 95% gargabe and contributes zero to getting people informed. I firmly believe that if the news industry disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn't be much worse off as a society.

That google is a bad player should be dealt with on its own. We shouldn't be using the "news industry" as a justification for breaking google up.

EDIT: In fact I had never thought about it, but even as far as keeping people informed, google is better than the "news industry". At least with google I can find links which I use as starting points for reasearching something.

Has worked elsewhere. Here in the UK, money transfer is mind boggingly fast, and free.

Viral. I thanked Jonath in a different post :-P

When I see projects like this (I mean especially Julia, but also people sharing their work on packages like this) I feel very fortunate that elements of the free software movement are still alive.

No questions. Just wanted to thank you for sharing. People like you make the world better one tiny bit at a time.

Truly truly thank you for your work <3

Very thin content. There were really only two options: regex or parser. This is close to "You won't believe what happened next" level of content.